Even Weather Turns British for Royal Couple

Won’t someone please give these two kids a couple of margaritas and some nachos?

If the UK/LA festival is all about Britain meeting California, then on Monday, Britain was winning.

Amid London-like rain and fog, Britain’s Duke and Duchess of York roamed the Southland, sampling English bangers at an upscale supermarket, surveying British cars (“Nice color,” said the duchess of a 1947 Empire-red MG) and reviewing so many British clothes, fabrics and fragrances that she told California Museum of Science and Industry exhibit designer Dextra Frankel that “you could get dressed, you could put scent on and you could go out,” all right there.

The three-months-pregnant duchess seemed engrossed in a new British ventilator for premature infants, although on Monday the wriggling “infant” inside was a battery-powered doll coaxed away from the co-inventor’s niece for the exhibit.

Sarah did not pick it up, although a British press photographer shouted his request that she do so. “Can you believe them?” she laughed to Dr. Anil Mehta, co-creator of the innovative ventilator, which regulates its pace by the infant’s own breathing pattern.

At Vons Pavilions in Arcadia, they were content just to gaze at the sushi, but both tried their hand in a “War of the Roses”--cake decorating. Andrew made a rather crooked rose in Lancaster red, and Sarah created a creditable rose in York-white frosting.

“He dropped his and didn’t get it where he wanted it on the cake,” said Vons chairman and chief executive Roger Stangeland. “She was very careful to get hers where she wanted it. His sort of flopped.”

Give a duke a break. After all, said Stangeland of their half-hour grocery store tour, “he commented to me that he had really never been in a supermarket before.”

Braved the Rain

On the third day of their nine-day Southland visit as patrons of the UK/LA ’88 festival, the pair made the retail rounds, with the duchess walking briefly through a drizzle to greet fans waiting outside the Arcadia supermarket.

Before lunch at Bullocks Wilshire in Los Angeles, they opened the Asprey display of antique British watches and “automata,” like a tiny 1790 gold music box.

But what caught Andrew’s eye after looking at suits, shoes, shirts and ties exactly like those in the British shops was a $12,000 sterling silver hard-hat--which he immediately donned--authentic down to the leather harness inside, said Edward Asprey, an officer of the 207-year-old London company. “As they’re building a new house in London, we thought it would be appropriate for him to try on.”

The hard-hat seemed like a bargain after the duchess struck a pose in front of a $250,000 sculpture of an American eagle with a 6-foot wingspan, made of vermeil and Arkansas rock crystal, and asked drolly, “Andrew, will you buy this for me?”

Their morning began aboard the royal yacht Britannia, berthed in Long Beach, where the duke opened a floating financial seminar attended by about 80 California industrialists.

The couple then left and the executives sailed grandly through choppy seas, talking business and eating lunch, a menu “personally chosen” by the queen, they were assured. As a memento of the first of two seminars designed to lure California investment and trade to Britain, executives from such companies as Lockheed, Hewlett-Packard and Ford received a notebook, bound in royal blue velvet and stamped “Britain, the Preferred Location.”

“It’s definitely a public relations ploy to create good will,” said Henry Termeer of the Boston biotechnology firm Genzyme. “I think it’s an excellent idea. Every European country does this sort of thing, but not every country has a royal family with a ship like this.”

For Monday’s schedule, Sarah wore her third black straw hat in as many days, and her red hair was bound up in a pink-dotted black-net snood. Andrew wore a charcoal-gray suit, and she wore a black-skirted suit with a tight-fitting jacket of the same color as the fish on all those menus this week--salmon.

Photographers Galore

For the first three days, the brightest glow has not been California sunshine, but photographers’ lights. “We can’t get away from you, can we?” the duke muttered at one point in the museum.

Still, the sun broke out long enough for the Yorks to walk by a crowd of 250 shrieking schoolchildren and into the museum, but not before efforts to bridge a flooded gutter failed and the duchess set one foot into cold, flowing rainwater.

The exhibits on show through April include a full-scale model of the British Giotto satellite, and the couple, both qualified pilots, seemed engrossed in a model of a British-made passenger jet.

The couple surveyed several other British exhibits--including Wedgewood pieces, a British musical synthesizer and a sequined Zandra Rhodes dress draped behind a cyclone fence--before examining the infant-care technology. British actor Roger Moore had, at a gala fund-raising dinner the night before, offered them a coupon for disposable diapers.

At the dinner, Sarah, perhaps scotching rumors that she was carrying twins, presented the fire-ravaged Central Library with a specially bound volume, “British Heritage,” saying, “We decided, all three of us”--presumably meaning Andrew and the coming baby--”to present this book.”

The Yorks themselves got a a few more goodies for their services on Monday:

Besides Mayor Bradley’s gift of a crystal map of the United States, with L.A. dotted with an emerald chip, they were given California wines, a blue suede jacket Andrew had admired at Bullocks Wilshire, a framed museum poster of a child in a rocket and a blue-green boogie board, whose use had to be explained to them.

If the rain keeps up, they can use it to float back to their yacht in Long Beach, where, the Rev. A. LeRoy Young said during his sermon to the royal pair on Sunday, their visit “is the biggest thing that has happened in this city since the Richfield oil refinery exploded, and that was in 1933.”